A Touch of Blue

I really like the look of colored Quadcopter frames.  I've done some digging, and I just plain can't find a good resource that says how to do it.  So...  I decided to try coming up with my own methods. 

My first swing was to use nail polish.  The blue I chose was to dark, and dark nail polish on a grey/black frame edge.. well that's no good. 

White paint to the rescue!

 

 

And then some blue..

 

And that doesn't look to shabby.  At least for a first try.  I'm working on a tutorial now.   

A FPV Maltese, at Night.

The Maltese has spent most of it's life without FPV gear on it.  I bought it, mostly, to have a super duarable airframe that I could beat the snot out of.  It's served the goal admirably.

Being the cheapest, strongest, thing in my toolbox also means it's a guinea pig.  ...  This time, it got a whole bunch of stuff strapped to it.  

SwitchElectrician bought some RC headlights to put on a quad.  The awesome bit is that they're designed to take a standard servo signal.  The not so awesome bit is that they're 2s only.  Hanging off the nose (does a symetrical Quad HAVE a nose?) is a 2s lipo pack.  They don't show up very well, but there's also a pair of headlights either side of the FPV camera.

It almost looks like it's got a nose.  And a fat lip.  That FPV camera is the one I built a few posts back.  

It's only impressive in that it's a huge mess of wires.  But it's MY mess of wires....  

HobbyKing has been stocking these ~9" long LED bars.  I strapped one to the back of the electronics tower on this little bird.  All that green, the green that's lighting up the no parking sign 40' away... yeah, that's that light.  

There's really a remarkable amount of lighting on the Maltese.  This is just before it's second takeoff, and it's sitting on the apron of my driveway.

This really gives you a sense of scale.  And the amount of light the thing is throwing off.  I wasn't flying FPV yet, but the headlight really seems like it will do some good.  

So after a few tries in the street, we moved down to a small park that follows the local creek.

Yes, it's really that bright.  

Kryptonite... Maybe?

Well lit quads, with clear props, look so good flying overhead.  Even when there's nothing for those lights to hit, the illumination of the airframe is really awesome to see.

The antenna or something in my rig, really limited the transmission range.  I'm going to try swapping for a real RP-SMA plug and a circular polarized antenna.  We found that I only had 30-40' of good reception range with the home made transmitter setup.

The evaluation of that rig will be a post later.